Browsed byTag: Nietzsche

…Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm wanting?—Water—there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip…

Zarathustra’s eyes had discerned that a young man avoided him. As he walked one evening alone through the mountains surrounding the town, which is called The Motley Cow, behold, there while walking he found this young man leaning against a tree, gazing wearily into the valley.1 This section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, called On the Tree on the Mountain, speaks primarily to the ones Colin Wilson calls “outsiders.” It speaks to those lonely souls who are obsessed with striving, with…

In Tanner’s dream, Dona Ana de Ulloa (resembling Ann Whitefield) comes to converse with him, and is soon joined by the Statue from Mozart (symbolizing Ann’s deceased father), and Mendoza as the Devil. In the dream, Tanner is his ancestor, Don Juan. The conversation that ensues, Wilson says, is “the greatest scene in Shaw, and one of the pinnacles of English literature.”1 Dona Ana is under the impression that heaven is a place of happiness. She tells Don Juan, “I…

Jacob Böhme and Friedrich Nietzsche have a few things in common, according to Colin Wilson. Both men wanted to get at the same thing: ultimate reality. We have learned that Böhme is every bit as much an existentialist as Nietzsche: As we read him, we discover that many of the things he says are not new to the student of existentialism. There is frequently a Nietzschean note; what could be more Nietzschean than this? If thou art not a spiritual…

During the years, 1934-1961, Arnold J. Toynbee published twelve volumes of A Study of History. He was still in the process of writing it when Colin Wilson’s Religion and the Rebel was released in 1957, although by this time he had finished ten volumes. The books include studies of the development and disintegration of nineteen different civilizations. Where to begin on such a prolific intellectual? Since we are examining how these issues relate to the Outsider, we will begin there….

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would…

The task of constructing a global commonwealth — a planetary civilisation — which still preserves the integrity and dignity of different human experiences of the Earth, and one in which all kinds of different people can still feel at home in the Earth, is the Great Work of our time. It requires a different and more adequate consciousness structure — an integrating consciousness. That means, largely, a switch from an “either/or” type of logic to a “both/and” type of logic….

Another gun rampage, another massacre today, this time on the campus of Umpqua Community College in southwestern Oregon. Add thirteen to the many senselessly killed in the past several decades at the hands of those seemingly possessed by what Scott Preston calls “ultimate self-contradiction leading to self-annihilation (A Tsunami of Unreason II, The Chrysalis). We are living in the midst of what Nietzsche predicted well over a century ago, and what came after his pronouncement of the death of God:…

In the consciousness mutations, there is a process of rearrangement in a discontinuous and intermittent (sprunghaft) form apart from spatially and temporally dependent events. These processes of relocation make it possible for the intensified spiritual origin to be assimilated into human consciousness. Origin itself comes to awareness in a discontinuous mutation: consciousness mutations are completions of integration (Gebser 39). In my article, Origin and Beginning, I have attempted to say a few words about what the idea of “Origin” means…

We have been hearing much in the news recently concerning thousands of refugees fleeing from their homes in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan only to be met with closed borders. The Hungarian borders have even been lined with razor wire, along with many police and military personnel. They attempt to deter the refugees with teargas, pepper spray, and water cannons. This is the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War. What we are seeing everyday in…